


Aurelio

by Winterling42



Series: Flesh and Blood and Dust [24]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Backstory, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-08
Updated: 2016-05-08
Packaged: 2018-06-07 04:45:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6785767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Furiosa finally feels confident enough to start a plan of her own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry for the mini-haitus, guys! I was on such adventures as Laptop Stops Working, and then Laptop Charger Stops Working. :( On the other hand, this has absolutely allowed me to build up a backlog of stories, so expect a burst of posting over the next few days.

It was not long after that she saw Aurelio again. 

Somewhere along their desiccated bond, she knew the time had been coming. It was long and longer since she’d seen her daemon up close, let alone touched him. As one of the Wretched, it would have been dangerous to be seen with a witch’s range. As a War Boy, it would have been deadly. Even now, an Imperator and practically untouchable with Joe’s favor and her continued duty in the Vault, Furiosa felt fear swallow her stomach whenever she thought of Aurelio anywhere near the Citadel. Part of it was that she still worried they would be recognized. If Joe or his hyena had any inkling of the thing they had promoted to Imperator, they said not a word about it. But the other Imperators would never let it stand, to have a disgraced Wife among them. They hated her enough as it was, for the crime of having breasts. 

That was alright, as long as it made no more sense than that. Furiosa hated them back, with far more reason than they had for hating her. 

 

There was an opportunity that she had never seen before, a glaring vulnerability in the Citadel’s rigid structure that she both hated and adored. She’d never known about it, because Ripsaw had never taken advantage. 

Imperators were allowed to go out alone. 

She was in the Garage when it happened; Secundus and his warthog daemon marched in, telling everyone as loudly as he could that he was on a solo mission from the Immortan himself, and would everyone get the _hell_ out of his way. ‘Everyone’ being War Boys on his own crew, they did. Furiosa was working on a car she’d taken for her crew, one of Secundus’s until two days ago.

She used to think that Imperators’ negotiations might have more _words_ in them than the ones War Boys conducted, but it turned out they went along much the same lines. Secundus revved the engine on his car too long, glaring at her from under his Imperator’s grease. With those two black eyes, it looked like the grease went all the way down to his cheeks. Furiosa stared back at him, blank-faced, until he’d given up intimidating her and let his tires squeal on their way out towards the lift. 

Later, when she was back on her own turf and her crew was crowing over the new vehicle, she asked Ace. Not about Secundus – she understood him perfectly – but about what he’d been doing, one man taking Citadel property out of the Citadel with Joe’s orders wrapped around his arm like a banner. 

“Imperators go out, sure,” Ace said, thoughtful. He always sounded like he was chewing something, these days, and Furiosa was caught between worrying that he’d gone and gotten a tumor between his teeth or something, and telling herself she didn’t care. He was a half-life, she was not. That was the way the world worked. “Nobody really knows what for. Scouts go in pairs, an’ cover the territory better.” Ace shrugged. “Most Boys think it’s killing they do. The sneaky kind, the kind that one person does better than a crew.” 

“What do you think?” Furiosa asked, possibility and danger crowding through her head. _A long day’s run, heading east_. 

Ace ground his teeth, puzzling through an answer. “I think it ain’t ever gonna be my business what goes on in those runs. There’s enough killing goes on here at home that I don’t need to be worrying about what happens off my watch.”

Furiosa nodded, and let Bones pull her back into the circle of Boys congratulating her on winning the car from Secundus and his crew. She smiled the feral smile they all knew, and let their words wash over her. All she could think about was the hum of a bike between her legs, and in her head the engine was singing, _free, free, free_.

 

Of course it wasn’t that easy. Nothing ever was. She started small. Taking risks now, when she had some inkling of a _plan_ , would be stupid. And in the Citadel, stupid was synonymous with dead. 

In the end, she was always surprised at how easy the Imperators, and even Joe himself, were to manipulate. A few conversations with her crew that she knew would be overheard, dropped hints that she disliked both night-time runs and riding with anything less than a full convoy, and her fellow Imperators were practically begging Joe to send her out alone. They wanted her dead, or better yet disgraced, and Joe wanted his jobs done. All of them were, in their own way, blind to the idea that Furiosa could have any agenda of her own. 

In the meantime, she was pulling on her bond with Aurelio as hard as she could. There were no thoughts exchanged, no words, only a hungry urgency and loneliness that he would have to understand. Who knew how far he had flown, the past eighteen hundred days? He could be halfway across the world, not bound by legs and heavy human bones like she was. (In truth she didn’t believe that he’d gone far. It was impossible, even knowing their range, to imagine him further away than the edge of the nearest Tower.)

The first time she went out, it was on foot. She took one of the broad, wide tunnels down to the surface, the one workers used. It opened up about fifteen feet above the ground and provided easy access to the lower cages where traitors and cowards were hung. It was, of course, guarded by two bored War Boys. They snapped to attention when they saw her, saluting like Bullet Farmers, and Furiosa felt something that, on a less guarded face than hers, might have been a smile. 

“I’m going out,” she told them, as if she expected complete obedience. Most War Boys, Ace included, had an engrained habit of obeying an Imperator with confidence in her voice and a rifle strapped across her back. 

“Sure,” one of the Boys said, fetching the ladder leaning up against one wall. “Any idea when you’ll be back?” 

“Don’t leave the ladder down,” was all Furiosa said. 

“Sure,” he said again, dumb as Plug had been, before he got himself blown up on the Fury Road. They held the ladder steady as she climbed down onto clean sand, still warm through her boots. Furiosa started off across the almost-empty sand without hesitation, her spine straight and her shoulders tight until she was out of sight of the tunnel. Then she sighed and ran her hand through her shorn hair, the familiar bristling and lack of pain enough to reassure her. 

She set off deeper into the moonlit Wasteland, keeping one eye on the sky and the other peeled for any Wretched stupid enough to get near her. It struck her that the only missions Joe would send an Imperator to on foot would have to be to the Wretched camps, and even then he was more likely to send a whole crew. More intimidating that way. Furiosa was busy planning the mission in her head when Aurelio appeared, dropping out of the sky like a star landing on her shoulder. 

“Furiosa!” he cried, softly, and wrapped a wing around her head. His claws, she noticed, fit perfectly into the grooves of her shoulder harness, as if they were made to go there. 

“Always, always,” she murmured, not sure what she was saying. “You’ll always fit perfectly with me, Aurelio. Believe me.”

“You’ve been gone so long,” he keened, trying to preen back every short clump of hair that he could reach. “And I couldn’t get home, Furiosa, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“What?” too shocked to say anything else, she held up her metal wrist for him to walk down onto it, feeling his fear and guilt and shame drip like poison down her spine. 

“I went over the mountains,” Aurelio whispered, unable to look at her. He huddled on her metal arm, a dark blot of feathers barely resembling a bird. “I thought – I was stupid, but I thought I could find them and bring them back to you. Instead…” 

The little eagle’s voice trailed away, but Furiosa felt his failure as her own. A new fear peeled through her, that she had been wrong about the mountains. That the slavers who took her had turned her around too many times. That she was truly lost, with the Citadel the only solid thing remaining in a sea of desert mirages. 

“I was stopped by the crows,” Aurelio said at last. “Every time. They came up at me in mobs, they didn’t care that I was daemon and not flesh and blood. Only Dust, which wouldn’t feed them. But I was always stopped too soon, Furiosa, don’t worry. It wasn’t the long run Katie used to talk about. I couldn’t make it alone, but we never went that way when we were with our Mothers. Together we could do it, if I showed the way and you kept the crows off.”

Furiosa was ashamed to feel hope spark up in her again, like an engine turning over. She had thought she’d outgrown hope. She still told herself she didn’t need it. But she cradled Aurelio close, and she could almost feel the miles running away with her, back and back and back to the Green Place. With her daemon warm against her, anything felt possible. 


	2. Chapter 2

 

After that, she didn’t dare go out again without orders. And there were days in the Vault to live through, revealing her past piece by piece to the curious, wounded Wives. Days with her crew, maintaining vehicles or out on patrol. Nights alone, wonderfully alone, to stare out of her tiny window towards the stars and start her planning. 

With the seeds she had planted among the Imperators, she didn’t have long to wait. Joe sent her out to lay mines in an empty patch of desert, deep in the dark of the moon on a bike with a deep hum to its engine instead of a growl. Furiosa did as she was told with Aurelio perched on her shoulder, fluttering back to wait with the bike when he got tired of the constant bending over she had to do. 

There was no explanation for what she’d done, but when Joe sent Primus out on a patrol to that same patch, they took the salvage Rig with them. Furiosa had to grit her teeth and stay silent when the broken Buzzard cars that should have gone to her (and by extension, to her crew) went to Primus’s boys instead. This, then, was the price to be paid for her late night jobs. If this was all it cost to see Aurelio again, she would pay it gladly. 

Gradually Furiosa gained the new measure of autonomy she would need to organize an escape. For the moment, she kept the time she spent in the Vault and the time she spent in the Citadel in different parts of her head. She’d meant what she said to Angharad, the first time the Wife had asked for help. _I will not help you kill yourselves. Better a life in the Vault than no life at all._

Angharad had cursed her and called her a hypocrite, but Furiosa hadn’t been given a choice about the way she’d left that place. And if she had been given Angharad’s choice as a Wife, Furiosa knew which she would choose. She had made a promise that stood above all things. _Survive._

And now her survival included solo missions, everything from silencing certain voices in the Wretched camps to black-market deals with Gas Town or selling Wretched as miners to the Bullet Farm. It was here that Furiosa put into practice the bargaining she had learned from Angharad, three thousand days ago. Remembered how to see the way a man moved and know how far she could drive the price. To know what it was the monsters wanted so that she could feed them. 

The Wretched of the Citadel knew her better than the other Imperators, not necessarily because she was around them more (though her fellows were quick to push any job involving the crowded, dying masses towards Furiosa when they could) but because of some lingering memories of when she had been one of them. She killed those that Joe told her to, but she did it in a way that the Wretched would understand. Seldom was she sent to bring back the speakers for the Cages – the ones she killed wanted to be martyrs, and instead they died for spoiling a water seep, or stealing Citadel resources, or hounding the shadow daemons into attacking War Pups. Furiosa made it known that they had died for stupid things, not a cause hardly anyone believed in, and the Wretched trusted her. Of all the things she had done over her thousands of days as an Imperator, those killings barely made a mark. 


End file.
